d. Affection
Such as personal interest, motivation, attitudes, beliefs, feelings; students will attend a better understanding to the story about a topic if they find personally interesting. The cause
of greater understanding is also affected by reader’s attitude and beliefs, readers could understand materials better when it matches their own attitudes and beliefs on a topic. This
affection is usually linked to each other.
e. The purpose of reading
This fifth factor also determines the comprehension ability, student could also have difficulties to understand the story if he reads it with no particular purpose in mind.
Comprehension is always directed and controlled by the needs and purposes of an individual
12
. If that so, they must establish their own purpose before reading and commits the entire story to memory.
f. Skills of comprehending
Another factor which influences the depth and the amount of comprehension is the skills that the students have developed for that purpose; the ability to comprehend develops
gradually from the simple to the complex skills. The teacher give a balanced program, include direct teaching of techniques which will aid the student in developing attitudes and
skill of thoughtful, purposeful reading. From all the factors, the writer only discussed the problem of the students’
language ability that includes vocabulary as the main subject. Yap 1979 concludes that there are causal links probably do exist between vocabulary and comprehension and that
vocabulary is likely to be predominant causal factor. Davis 1968, 1972 also did extensive investigation into the question whether there are identifiable sub skills within the over all
ability to read and he found that vocabulary was the most important and had the strongest effect.
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C. Vocabulary
1. The Definition of Vocabulary
12
F. Dubin, D.E. Eskey and W. Grabbe, Op Cit, P. 14
13
Ronald Carter and Michael McCharty, Vocabulary and Language Teaching London: Longman, 1988, P. 98
When we consider by what we mean with vocabulary, the first idea that probably occurs to our brain is “words”, we may have pretty clear idea of what the words are. It is a
sequence of letter bounded by spaces.
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Evelyn Hatch and Cheryl Brown states that vocabulary is a list or set of words for particular language and a list or set of word that
individual speaker might use.
15
Vocabulary is a basis of language; it is the “first of language”.
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Vocabulary as one of the language aspects have to be learned when people are learning a language. Good
mastery of vocabulary is important for anyone who learns the language used in listening, speaking, writing and reading besides grammar. A learner of the foreign language will
speak fluently and accurately, write easily or understand what he or she reads or hears if he or she has enough vocabulary and has capability of using it accurately.
It is obvious that vocabulary is very important in learning a language, especially in English, because the English vocabulary is extremely large and varies as well. Therefore, it
is highly essential for English teachers to help their students’ in mastering vocabulary. Norbert Schmitt gave the definition of vocabulary as a basis of a language; it is
very important to be mastered first. We cannot speak well and understand written materials if we do not master it.
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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines “vocabulary means all the words that someone know, learn of uses or the words that are typically used when talking
about particular subject or a list of words with the explanation of their meanings in a book for learning foreign language”.
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In some literature, we found the meaning of vocabulary. There are some definitions of vocabulary. A. S. Hornby in “Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current
English” states that vocabulary is: 1.
Total number of words which with rules for combining them make up a language.
14
Nobert Schmitt, Vocabulary in Language Teaching New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, P.1
15
Evelyn Hatch and Cherryl Brown, Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995P.1
16
David Crstal, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995 P.116
17
Norbert Schmitt, op cit. P.2
18
Longman, Dictionary of Contemporary English, Second edition Harlow: Longman Group, 1987P. 1177
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